


Principle

by Dragonflies_and_Katydids



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Post Game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-05
Updated: 2014-10-05
Packaged: 2018-02-19 22:40:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2405507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragonflies_and_Katydids/pseuds/Dragonflies_and_Katydids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the fight in the Gallows, Hawke goes on the run with an ever-diminishing group.  Fenris is not pleased.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Principle

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first fanfic I've ever written. ::waves shyly:: I've read a lot, but I was never inspired to write any until this last DAII playthrough (in preparation for Inquisition, is it out yet???). I finished the game and realized I wasn't done with that character yet, thankyouverymuch.
> 
> So, ummm, I hope I didn't screw up the tags or anything.

 

Aveline was the first to leave us, gone with Donnic when we were hardly ten steps from the Gallows' courtyard. She crushed Hawke in a hug first, hard and brief, gave me a wary nod, and then she was gone, off to rally her guardsmen to protect whatever they could. They would keep children from dying, keep women from being raped, and still a part of me hated her for leaving us. For being the first to leave Hawke. The others left, too, in their own time, but she was the first.

No. I take that back. She wasn't the first to abandon Hawke.

That distinction belongs to Anders, left cold on the stones where he died. He was never a friend to me, never more than an uneasy ally, but I felt Hawke's knife in my gut when Anders fell.

Or maybe it was the look on Hawke's face that twisted my stomach. Here was the man who had stood over his mother's desecrated corpse and made jests even as tears ran down his cheeks, but he walked away from Anders's body without a word.

So Aveline was the _second_ to leave Hawke. Merrill followed on her heels, with her own people to save, though I doubt she had much luck among the willing slaves in the alienage. They choose every day not to save themselves. Why would today be any different?

Which left only the four of us to find our way out of Kirkwall: myself, Isabela, Varric, and Hawke. We stopped at Hawke's estate, for what money and supplies we could carry, and to send Orana away. She didn't want to go, but neither could she follow where we were going. She would be dead within a week, by a stray blade if the pace didn't kill her.

Hawke sent her to Merrill. The best of bad options, which could describe any number of choices we had made in the past weeks.

Bodahn and Sandal were gone, their rooms stripped of any personal touch. Remembering Sandal surrounded by corpses in the Gallows a few hours earlier, and remembering the ogre turned to crystal so many years ago, I didn't worry much about their safety. By the tension in Hawke's face, he wasn't able to shake free of his concerns so easily, but we had no time to hunt them through the city. We couldn't risk returning to the Gallows, which left few options for where to begin such a search.

From Hawke's estate, we left the city. Not that it was so easy as that. Templars and mages still fought, and where word had spread of Meredith's fate, they fought all the harder. We were barely out of the city at nightfall, and we were forced to make a cold camp in the shadow of the Twins. Too dangerous to run through the darkness, even for us: there would be no way to know friend from enemy until it was too late.

Not that daylight helped much. The fighting had abated, more from exhaustion than anything, but the fear and rage and hate were no weaker. And though we could now see the faces of those we met, there was no knowing what they saw when they looked at us: the Champion of Kirkwall, or its betrayer.

So we stayed off the roads as much as we could and made our way to one of the caves around Kirkwall. It looked vaguely familiar to me, so perhaps we had searched it at some point during my years in Hawke's company. Or perhaps not. We crawled through so many caves, and they all begin to look the same after a while.

A nest of spiders had taken up residence in this one, but the four of us overmatched them considerably. Even in so brief and one-sided a fight, I found myself missing Aveline. I had fought by her side for so long, and I had grown accustomed to her shield standing ready to guard the others from anyone who came too close. The spiders hardly had time to see us coming, but my heart still beat faster than the exertion of the fight could explain.

For a little while, routine blurred the recent past. The bodies had to be dragged away, deeper into the tunnels so their presence at the cave mouth didn't risk betraying our presence. A fire had to be laid, and wood gathered to feed it through the night. The food scavenged from Hawke's estate had to be assessed and portioned out. The tunnels nearest the cave we settled in had to be scouted and trapped, in case any other dangers appeared in the night. All tasks we had done a hundred times, and little conversation was needed.

There was cheese, and bread only a little stale, to round out the dried meat that would soon make up all our meals. It was far from the worst meal any of us had ever eaten, but even if it had been, I doubt anyone would have noticed. Isabela made a half-hearted attempt to flirt with Hawke, whose acknowledging grunts hardly counted as responses. Varric leaned against the cave wall with his eyes closed, his fingers moving idly along Bianca's stock. Occasionally, he would frown without opening his eyes, and his lips would move as if he were talking to himself. Composing another epic about the Champion of Kirkwall, no doubt.

Not that Hawke looked much like the man in Varric's stories, not now. His head was up and his shoulders straight, but he stared into the fire with that same blank face he had worn since the Gallows. There wasn't a glimmer of the wit and intelligence that had always burned there, that had drawn me to him in the first place.

More than once I had seen slaves pushed beyond the limits of what their minds could withstand, and it made me want to hurt someone to see Hawke look like one of Hadriana's playthings. He had carried on without flinching for so many years, I had begun to believe that the man in Varric's stories was more truth than fiction: that impossible creature, a man who couldn't be broken. A comfort to me, who had been broken more than once.

If Anders had been there, I would have killed him again.

Instead, I laid the Blade of Mercy across my knees and stared at it so I wouldn't have to look at Hawke. That also saved me from watching Isabela throw worried glances at him, or from watching Varric pretend everything was fine.

The rage simmering inside me was something I hadn't felt since Danarius died. Once, I would have welcomed its return, but I had learned to enjoy its absence. Something else I owed to Hawke, who had never seemed to carry anger or pain beyond the moment.

Unable to sit still any longer, I surged to my feet. "I'll be back," I said to the air above the fire and strode away into the darkness.

#

I walked every tunnel at least once during the night, riding that strange place half outside the real world that my lyrium tattoos opened to me. I found another few spiders and vented the tiniest portion of my anger on them. Otherwise, there was little for me to do besides rage in silence.

I looked in on the others occasionally. Isabela was asleep the first time I passed by, or at least doing a respectable imitation of it. Varric stayed awake a while longer, lost in his own story, but eventually he lay down across the fire from Isabela. Hawke never moved.

At least, not until the fourth time I passed by, when it was nearly dawn. I hoped for a moment that he was sleeping, but only two forms stretched out by the fire's embers.

Rage turned to dread, though I couldn't have said what I was afraid of. Of all people, Hawke could take care of himself. Without waking Varric or Isabela, I searched the tunnels I had already walked through so many times. Only when those were empty did I turn my steps toward the exit.

Which was, of course, where Hawke had been all along. He sat just inside the cave mouth, his eyes fixed on the eastern sky as intently as they had been fixed on the campfire.

I followed the line of his gaze, hoping for some insight into his thoughts. The sun wasn't up yet, and the pre-dawn light turned the Wounded Coast into slashes of gray and black. A few feet from the mouth of the cave, the sea nibbled at the shore. The water was the color of tarnished silver, and very still. Mist curled from the surface, barely visible.

Hawke's hand on my arm startled a gasp from me. I turned to find him looking at me for the first time since yesterday. Really looking at me, his brown eyes tight at the corners but no longer frighteningly blank.

"Do you remember what the Arishok said?" he asked.

Now it was my turn to stare. The Arishok had been dead for three years, and Hawke had mentioned him perhaps twice in that time. What particular moment was I supposed to remember? The Qunari had said a great number of things in my hearing, none of which seemed relevant to our current problems.

Perhaps sensing my confusion, Hawke added, "In the throne room, when we first entered. About principle."

Ah yes.

"You are no different from these bas," the Arishok had said. "You do not see."

Hawke had barely finished stepping over the Viscount's head, but he still had a flip answer at the ready. "I see a man willing to start a war on principle."

And the Arishok's response, just as quick. "What would the Qunari be without principle? You, I expect."

I had thought Hawke oblivious to the intended insult, but perhaps those words had burrowed deeper over time.

"I remember," I said, looking back at the dawn breaking over the Wounded Coast. "Why do you ask?"

"I've been thinking of them a lot lately."

I waited for him to go on, to explain, though I thought I knew what was on his mind.

The silence stretched out between us. Not the tenuous, comfortable silence we had just been learning, but the old, awkward silence that hung between us when first we met. That silence had been too full of anger and fear and mistrust, later mixed uneasily with the promise of sex. I hated it nearly as much as I hated myself for not knowing how to fix it.

Words had always been Hawke's strength, not mine.

At last I gave up scrambling for something to say and simply put my arm around his waist, still without looking directly at him. He stood there for an even-more-awkward moment, neither rejecting nor accepting the embrace. Then my heart began to beat again when he wrapped his arm around my shoulders and leaned into me.

"When I saw what Anders had done..." His voice trailed off, and the silence stretched out again. Then he made a sound like he was choking, and went on in a strained voice. "When I saw the chantry burning, I thought the whole world was burning with it, just for a second. I know how you feel about mages, but I always hoped to find some middle path between complete freedom and complete enslavement. For Bethany, if for no one else. When I saw the chantry burning, it was like watching Bethany die all over again."

I wrapped my arm tighter around him, knowing my armor must be digging into him and unable to stop myself.

"And there he was, so righteous, and I thought, 'You want to die for your cause? Fine.' All those people, Fenris. What did they do to deserve a death like that?"

"Nothing," I whispered. I wanted to add more, to let out some of the rage inside me, but I held it back. This was what happened when mages were granted freedom: they used it in ways too horrible to think of.

Bethany had been different, not like most mages I had met, but who knows what she would have become in time. Under Anders's influence, nothing good.

 _And what about Hawke's influence?_ I couldn't answer my own question. I loved Hawke, but I couldn't deny that the Arishok had understood him all too well. Principle was not what guided him, most days: pleasing his friends, caring for his family, those were the things that drove Hawke forward.

As someone who was a friend, maybe even family, I was hardly in a position to complain.

I kept silent, aware that none of these thoughts were what Hawke needed to hear but unable to find a pretty lie that didn't sound false before I ever said it.

"I see two things when I close my eyes," Hawke went on at last. "I see Anders bleeding, and I see the chantry burning." He snorted, a ghost of his normal laugh. "It doesn't make for sweet dreams."

I knew a good cure for sleeplessness, one Hawke had taught me. I turned him toward me, and kissed him hard, desperate to make him forget everything else for just a little while.

The Gallows courtyard flashed through my mind: the last time I had kissed him. As arousing thoughts go, it was lacking, and I thought from the stiffness in Hawke's shoulders that he might be remembering the same thing.

I started to pull away, helplessness mixing with the anger like air mixes with fire, but Hawke's hands gripped the hair at the back of my neck and wouldn't let me go far. He loosened his hold as soon as I stopped trying to pull away, well aware how little I liked to be pinned.

"Wasn't it you, always cautioning me about who might be looking?" He was teasing me, and for one horrible moment, tears of relief burned in my eyes.

I got them under control, but not before he noticed. His hand moved from my neck to my face, thumb stroking along my cheekbone. I kept my eyes closed, unsure what might show if I opened them.

His fingers continued to explore my face, tracing my ear, my jaw, and down to my neck, along the lyrium marks there. He gripped my chin and tilted my head up, his lips brushing lightly across my closed eyelids: left, then right. I felt the warmth of his breath, then the coolness of his lips as his mouth met mine again.

I slid my hands under his shirt, growling in frustration when my armor caught on the fabric. Hawke smiled against my mouth, tangling his fingers loosely in my hair once more to keep me from pulling away.

Not that I had any intention of doing so. A part of me was aware that it was past dawn, that Isabela or Varric might stumble on us. Hawke was right that I had always been the cautious one between us, but that didn't matter. I had fought Templars and sheltered mages for Hawke. What was a little public sex beside that?

His tongue traced my lips and I gave up worrying about what my armor was doing to his clothes. I ran my hands up his back, shoving fabric out of the way until I separated from the kiss long enough to pull the shirt over his head. His mouth, now hot, was back on mine while my hands were still full of cloth, his deft fingers working armor buckles he couldn't possibly see.

The scuffle of feet on stone caught my ear. Hawke must have heard it, too, because he pulled away just as Isabela, still blinking sleep from her eyes, came around a curve in the tunnel.

She stared at us, and it was a measure of the last few days that her first reaction was a confused frown. That was followed quickly by a smirk, and she opened her mouth to give some commentary, but Hawke spoke over her.

"Is Varric awake yet?"

"Still sleeping like a baby. Or like a dwarf who stayed up too late muttering to himself. Oh, wait...."

I snorted, and Hawke laughed. It didn't sound quite right, but it was something.

And then Isabela just had to continue. "Why? Do we have something pressing to attend to? Lost swords to find, kittens to rescue, dragons to slay?"

Just like that, the laughter was gone from Hawke's face. The corners of his eyes and mouth tensed, and those lips that had been so warm a moment ago compressed into a cold line.

"I've all the time in the world, it seems. So long as I avoid everyone and anyone who's ever been to Kirkwall."

"At least since that statue went up," Isabela agreed, apparently unaware of the tension spreading from Hawke to me. "Still, it's a big world out there, and a small cave in here."

"I'll second that," Varric said, and I looked past Isabela to see him leaning against the tunnel wall, almost out of reach of the daylight now streaming in. "Spiders aren't the most interesting conversationalists, even when they're alive."

"Talked to many, have you?" I asked, one eye on Hawke, who had resumed his stone-faced contemplation of the sea outside the cave.

"One is two too many," Varric said. "And there's a lot more than one in this cave. Or there were before you got to them, Broody."

Varric and his bloody nicknames. Though even I could see the humor in Varric calling me Broody, with Hawke doing such a fine job of it himself.

#

Brooding was exactly what Hawke did while we broke camp. I kept one eye on him as we sorted out who would carry what, helpless as he slipped back into that unnatural blankness. He was like a mage made Tranquil, and I felt an unwelcome surge of sympathy for Anders, faced with his lover's too-serene face all those years ago.

It didn't take long to wrap up our meager belongings, even without Hawke's assistance. We were nearly ready to go when he said out of nowhere, "We'll need to find me some new armor."

We all stopped and stared at him, then at the Champion's armor piled at his feet.

"I'm leaving it here," he said in answer to our unspoken question. "It's too distinctive. If things settle down, I can always come back for it."

The armor of the Champion of Kirkwall, won with more blood and tears than I cared to think about. No one ever doubted he was proud to wear it, but I wonder how many realized that it was as much symbol as protection for him. "I have won," it proclaimed to the world. "I came to this city the lowest of the low, and look how far I have risen."

The problem with rising so high is that it makes the fall that much more painful.

"We'll find something," I said, when it became clear that Varric and Isabela were, for once, struck speechless.

He gave me a false smile, almost a grimace. "I'm quick enough, I'll probably be fine without it."

"We'll find you something," I repeated with more force. "And you'll wear it."

This time his smile was real, if tiny. "Only because you ask so sweetly."

With no set destination in mind, only the need to put distance between ourselves and Kirkwall, we followed the coastline. We stayed off the roads as much as possible, and slept under hedges or in barns. After a few weeks of this, with no sign of pursuit, we risked an inn, uneasy but too desperate for news to pass up the opportunity.

Or rather, Hawke risked the inn, with Isabela and Varric behind him. I found an alley and lurked. I hated to let anyone else guard Hawke's back, but I was even more distinctive than the armor he'd left behind. The blade of mercy didn't help, and there was no way to conceal a sword that large, much less the lyrium-tattooed elf carrying it. I watched the sky with some apprehension, wondering if I was in for a soaking.

A steady drizzle had begun before a set of shutters flew open on the second floor and Isabela leaned out, flashing an impressive expanse of breast. I passed the sword up to her and scrambled up after it, tumbling into the room with less grace than I might have wished.

I had expected to find Hawke and Varric in the room, and was surprised to look around and find neither.

"They're downstairs," Isabela said at my frown. "But we thought you might find a bed more comfortable than the alley." Her grin was wicked, and implied more obscene acts than most people knew about.

I ate the food she had brought me and listened to what I could hear through the closed door. It wasn't much, mostly just the noise of a crowd of people. Tone came through just fine, though, and the tone was nervous. Voices were too high, too quick to break out into anger. There was never the crash and screaming of a fight, which was just as well: I don't know if I could have stayed in the room, wondering who was alive or dead.

Hawke was the first back to the room, his shoulders held in the same tight line they'd been in since the Gallows. I was lying on my back on one of the room's two beds, and the light from the open door cut across my eyes. Blinking against the afterimages, and then against the returned darkness, Hawke was more of a shadow than a man as he moved across the room to stand over me.

 _He's been a shadow for days now._ I pushed the thought away and reached up to take his hand. I had to guess where it was based on the line of his shoulder and neck, silhouetted against the window, and ended up grabbing his wrist instead.

The skin under my fingers twitched over muscle and tendon that in turn strained against some invisible force. By the flexing of those muscles, I felt Hawke curl and uncurl his fingers repeatedly.

I dropped my hand down to cover Hawke's, closing my fist over his. He pushed against my grip for a moment, then twisted away with a quick flick. I had seen him do it a hundred times, in a hundred fights, but it felt strange to have him use it against me. He hadn't done me any harm, and I hated how that one tiny gesture made me feel like I was kneeling at Danarius's feet once more.

Hawke crossed the room to lean out the window, hands braced on the sill. I could hear his breathing, harsh gasps as if he'd been running, though his breathing had been quiet enough when he came into the room.

I wanted to go to him. I wanted him to come to me.

I lay still and watched him.

"How do the Qunari live like this?" Hawke asked at last. "If principle defines them, how do they not go mad?"

It took me a moment to catch up to the conversation, and then I was ashamed. I was acting like a child, focused on my own troubles to the exclusion of all else.

I rolled off the bed and went to him, my hands against the wall on either side of him, as close as I could get without actually touching him. _I'm here,_ I wanted to tell him, but didn't know how. Words were his weapon, not mine.

His weapon, and his shield.

Each too-quick breath pushed his back against my chest, then away. His head hung down, braid over one shoulder so that the ragged end of it moved every time he exhaled.

I leaned in, letting my head fall gently to rest against his shoulder blade. Now I could feel his muscles tensing and shifting, but he didn't push me away again.

"The Qun appeals to you," he said, so low I would never have heard him if I hadn't been so close. "How does it not smother you? I would rather have Anders here, alive and arguing with you, than whatever meager justice his death bought."

This was dangerous ground, and doubly so for me. I said nothing, afraid to cut him again with words he didn't want to hear.

"I can hear you thinking, Fenris," he said, still quiet. "Whatever it is, say it."

"If you can hear me, then I hardly need to speak, do I?" It was a weak dodge and I knew it.

"Say it." And then, when I remained silent, he said again, harder, "Say it."

"Was there anyone you knew inside the chantry, when Anders destroyed it?"

His breathing slowed, and his tone when he spoke was puzzled. "Other than the grand cleric? Not really."

"And was she a friend?"

"No. Maybe an ally. Of sorts." Strange to hear him define his relationship with Elthina much as I had defined mine with Anders. "Why?"

"If you had no friends among the dead, then what right do you have to call that justice 'meager'?"

He went still, no longer shifting restlessly against me, no longer even breathing. I curled one arm around him, pulling him against me, afraid of what would happen next.

"But his death didn't bring any of them back, did it?" The words were hardly even a whisper.

Then he exploded, shoving back against me and flinging his arms wide to break my hold. He spun around and jabbed a finger into my chest. "They're still dead!" he shouted. "Tell me how it helped anyone to add one more body to the count!" His voice cracked on the last word.

I wished desperately for a light, but the glimmers creeping in around the door were only enough to make out his form, not his expression. I took a step forward, then stopped.

Hawke turned away from me again, this time to press his forehead against the rough planks of the wall. "I loved him, and he's dead."

Now I knew how Anders had felt in his last moments, as the knife went in. Danarius and Hadriana had taught me well, though, and no sound escaped me. I had suffered worse pain, in silence. I couldn't control the sick lurch of my stomach, and I closed my eyes, grateful for the darkness I had wished away only moments ago.

The door opened, spilling light and sound into the room. I spun towards the bed, grabbing up my sword and turning to face...

...Varric, who was already shutting the door again. The noise from the common room returned to its previous muted roar, and we were once again in darkness. The brief flash of light left spots dancing in front of my eyes, and I could no longer see even shadows to know where Varric was.

I could hear him clearly, however, when he spoke. "I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Hawke: you certainly have a way with people."

"What?" Hawke and I said together.

"I may not have your wit and charm, but even I know better than to tell my lover that I love someone else."

"I didn't mean it like that," Hawke protested angrily.

I heard Varric draw breath to respond, and I jumped into the pause. "Let it go, Varric." To hear Hawke say it had been bad enough. To have Varric drag it out into the light and parade it around was worse. "Where's Isabela?"

Silence, for a tense moment. Then Varric said, "She made some new friends. They'll probably feel much less friendly tomorrow, when they wake up with sore heads and no money, but they're enjoying themselves for now."

"You left her out there alone?" Hawke demanded, and I knew the sound of a man trying to pick a fight.

Not that it was easy to pick a fight with Varric. "You may not have noticed, but she's a big girl. I'd be more worried for whatever poor sod tries anything with her."

It was raining harder now, and the wind had shifted, carrying a cold mist into the room. Going out had no appeal, but neither did staying here. I could imagine the night to come: Hawke eager for a fight while I tried not to hurt him, and Varric amused at both of us.

Rage pressed against the inside of my chest, my anger at Hawke and Varric giving it a focus it hadn't had before. As angry as I was at Anders, he made a much less satisfying target than someone who could feel pain. The two in front of me could still be hurt, and words I would later regret clogged my throat.

My sword was still in my hand. I sheathed it and slung the baldric into place across my shoulder.

"Fenris?" Hawke said. "What are you doing?"

"Going out."

"In the rain, Broody? That's a bit much even for you."

"I'll be back," I said, and swung out the window to land in the alley.

Not that there was much to do in a small fishing village, after dark, in the rain: no gangs to terrorize, no rapists or slavers lurking in alleys to take advantage of the unwary. Especially since I wanted to remain out of sight. However mad I was at Hawke, I had no desire to give anyone a hint of where he was.

Leather armor doesn't do well in the rain, even armor as well-made and expensive as mine. I was chafing in several uncomfortable places by the time the sky began to lighten. Back at the inn, someone had left the window open. I needed a running leap, but I managed to catch the sill and pull myself in, more graceful than the previous night.

I nearly stepped on Hawke, where he leaned against the wall almost under the window. Varric was snoring lightly in the bed, back to back with Isabela.

In the time it took me to glance around the room, Hawke had woken up. He looked tired, and the smile he gave me didn't reach his eyes.

Isabela woke, sparing me any more uncomfortable conversations. "I've brought you a present," she said, her tone arch.

I wasn't in the mood for games, but neither was it fair to take out my frustration on her. As a compromise, I raised an eyebrow in question.

She rolled off the bed, startling Varric awake. "Morning, Broody," he mumbled, rubbing hard at his eyes. "Rivaini, you're the worst bed partner I've had a in a long time, and I'm sure you don't hear that often."

"It's hardly my fault you only wanted to sleep."

"If I had taken you up on your other offer, would you have twitched less?"

"Probably not." Isabela picked up a small bag from the table and turned to give Varric her most charming smile. "But you would have been too tired to notice."

She tossed the bag to me and I snagged it out of the air. Looking inside, I found a gritty, reddish-brown powder.

At my blank look, Isabela sighed. "Men." She added an eye roll for emphasis. "It's to dye your hair."

"A nice thought, but I think the tattoos will give me away, whatever color my hair is."

"We can cover those, too, though you'll have to give up the nighttime walks in the rain."

"No dye will cover them."

"I wasn't planning to try." She held up a second bag, about the size of the first. "Though I hope you don't mind looking like you were badly poxed. Some ugly scars are just the thing to cover it up _and_ to ensure no one looks too close."

"That won't do any good in the close confines of a ship," Hawke said.

The comment didn't make sense to me, but it meant something to Isabela, if her frown was anything to go by. "Since we're staying here, what difference does it make?" she asked.

Varric swung his legs off the side of the bed, feet swinging just short of the floor. "Isabela met an old friend last night," he said to me, raising one arm over his head to stretch.

"An old friend with a ship," Hawke added.

"But you were right," Isabela said, though she didn't look happy. "A ship is too dangerous."

"Too dangerous for me," Hawke said, and I could tell he was trying to sound cheerful. The effect was ghastly. "Doesn't mean it's too dangerous for you."

This earned him an eye roll to match the one she had just given me. "I go where you go. We've been over this before. What I said in the Gallows still holds."

"I think that fight cancelled all debts. You owe me nothing."

"This isn't about debt, Hawke." She smiled at him, a sweet smile unlike her usual leer. "Friendship isn't about who owes what. You taught me that, even if I'm not the quickest pupil."

He looked away, his face tight. "If you go with your friend and his ship, you can find out what's happening."

The way he said that dropped a weight into my stomach. "Is something happening besides the mages and templars fighting?"

"Yes," Isabela said.

I waited for her to go on, or for Varric to pick up the tale. When they both remained silent, I tore my gaze away from Hawke to frown at them. "Am I required to guess, then?"

"We don't know exactly what's happening," Isabela said. "Just rumors of demons running loose, and the Fade spilling over into the real world."

"And you believe any of it?"

"Yes," she said again, very quietly, and Varric nodded.

"You left out the best part," Hawke said, and his flat tone pulled my head back to him.

It was Varric who answered, this time. "The Seekers are hunting us, and rumor says they think Hawke responsible."

"Responsible? You're no mage, to control the Fade or summon demons."

Hawke shrugged one shoulder. "They're desperate for any explanation, and this chaos began soon after the mages rebelled in Kirkwall. Everyone knows which side I chose in that fight." He turned away to stare out the window, and murmured something too quiet for me to hear.

"What?" Varric, Isabela, and I asked together.

Hawke looked over his shoulder at us, and smiled for the briefest moment. "Perhaps the Seekers have the right of it. Perhaps I know something without even knowing I know."

My skepticism was reflected in the others' faces. "About the Fade?"

"The shadows will part and the skies will open wide," Hawke said, and a chill that had nothing to do with wet armor ran through me. "When he rises, everyone will see." There was no trace of a smile now.

"If you're going to turn seer," Varric said, "you could at least give us a _useful_ prophecy." The words were as flippant as ever, but his eyes were uneasy.

"It's not my prophecy," Hawke said, returning his gaze to the window. The sun was well and truly up now, leaving him nothing but a shadow against the light. "If it's even a prophecy at all."

"What else would it be?" Varric asked.

"Since it came from Sandal, it's more likely to be nonsense."

I thought of Sandal for the first time since we'd fled Kirkwall, and couldn't have agreed less. If those words had come from anyone else, I would have discounted them without hesitation, but too many unusual things happened around Bodahn's adopted son.

"But it doesn't matter," Hawke went on. "The Seekers are likely to be no friends of mine, not after what Anders did." He looked at Isabela, then at Varric, then at me. "Which is why all three of you need to be on that ship when it sails this afternoon."

Varric and Isabela spoke over each other, protesting. Hawke stared out the window and waited, only turning when they had both fallen silent again. "Isabela, your friend's ship will dock in nearly every port on this side of the Waking Sea. A sailor drinking in a tavern can learn more than a few rumors. And if that sailor is a beautiful woman?" He tilted his hand at her. "Men are eager to prove their wit to her, and let slip things they shouldn't."

Before she could give voice to the mutinous thoughts evident on her face, Hawke turned to Varric. "You know as much of my life as anyone alive. More than I know myself, I sometimes think. Take those tales, and see what else you can find in stories others will tell you. See if you can find some pattern in any of it."

At last those eyes turned to me, shadowed with too many emotions for me to read. "Servants and mercenaries know many secrets their so-called betters would rather keep quiet. What you can't learn from talk in the alienage, maybe you can learn by hiring out your sword."

How he thought I could do either of those things without being immediately identified, I didn't ask. It didn't matter: no matter how angry I was at him, I had no intention of leaving him, this side of the grave.

Isabela and Varric, however, were nodding, albeit reluctantly, and that reluctance faded as Hawke went on. "We'll meet again in a month, and perhaps we can put together the truth for ourselves. If we can find the source of the problem, we can solve it." Instead of the confidence I would have expected based on his words, his voice held a desperate hope. "We can fix what Anders broke. What I let Anders break."

"You didn't 'let' Anders do anything," I protested, and was grateful when Isabela and Varric joined their protests to mine.

"None of us knew what he'd planned until it was too late," Varric said.

"I should have known," Hawke said. "Sela petrae? I served at Ostagar, I know its uses. In either case, it doesn't matter now. It's done, and we must deal with the consequences. If we don't act to put the world to rights, who will?"

The arrogance in that was breathtaking, but I couldn't say it was entirely misplaced. Thinking back over our years in Kirkwall, we had done so many impossible things that it was hard to believe there was anything truly beyond us. To hear that old, familiar confidence back in Hawke's voice, even just for a moment, only strengthened my resolve. My place was at his side.

"Where will we meet?" Isabela asked, rather than answer Hawke's question.

He shot me an apologetic look, which I didn't understand until he said, "The slavers' den. The one where we fought Hadriana. As many traps as that place had, I think it's safe to say no one else will have settled into it."

I remembered that cave too well, and not only because of Hadriana. Those traps had reset themselves behind us, leaving us no choice but to continue on and hope there was another way out.

"One month," Isabela said, and there was a warning in the words, one that promised pain if Hawke wasn't there at the appointed time.

"One month," he said, raising his hand with mock-solemnity, as if he were taking an oath.

"We'll meet you in one month," I added, making it clear that "we" in this case was Hawke and me.

"Fenris..." Hawke sighed.

I gave him no chance to marshal his arguments. "This isn't open for discussion, Garrett." I rarely used his given name, and his eyebrows rose a little. "If there is a future to be had, I will walk into it gladly at your side."

He smiled, and I knew he was remembering the first time I had said those words to him. It was good to see him smile again, and to hear him joke with Isabela. To hear that thoughtless arrogance in his words once more, as much as it had made me tear my hair in Kirkwall.

"And I can't follow you from a ship that's sailing away from you," I added.

He raised his hands in defeat. "But you," he pointed at Isabela and Varric, "are going. That ship is too good an opportunity to pass up."

"And we'll see you in a month," Isabela said again.

"I'm hurt by your lack of trust," Hawke said.

Isabela laughed. I held my tongue against everything I wanted to shout at her. Was it so easy to leave Hawke behind, then? Despite her earlier words?

A part of me argued against the unfairness of that. Hawke was right: we needed information, badly. Asking questions about the Champion of Kirkwall, sitting beside a man who looked just like him, would be pressing our luck beyond all reason.

That voice of reason was the only thing holding back the words that threatened to tear out of my mouth. I ground my teeth and stared at the fire as they finished their plans.

And then Isabela's arms were around my neck, dragging me into a hug I couldn't bring myself to refuse. If I never saw her again, whatever the reason, I didn't want her last memory of me to be a stiff arm, pushing her away.

Varric clasped my hand hard, reaching up (way up) with the other to punch me lightly in the shoulder. "Take care of yourself, Broody."

"I will," I said. I had to force the words past the tightness in my throat, and they came out harsher than I meant. "You do the same," I added.

"I always do," he said.

When they were gone, the room was too quiet. All Hawke's energy and cheer fled again, revealed to be nothing but a mask. He lay on the bed, hands behind his head, and studied the ceiling as if it held some great secret.

The afternoon stretched interminably. I sat by the window, staring out into the rain, not caring that it chilled me. After my sleepless night spent prowling this flyspeck of a village, I should have been exhausted, but my thoughts kept me awake. Brooding, Varric would have called it, and he would have been right.

There was no shortage of things to brood on, but my thoughts lingered on the friends Hawke had gathered over the years. For years we had been each other's closest companions, more siblings than friends: bickering among ourselves until an outsider threatened any of us. Until Anders broke all of it apart.

And now, one by one, those friends had left him alone again. If Anders had the distinction of being the first, the others had still made the same choice. Even Anders wasn't really the first, not if I looked back over Hawke's life, at Leandra, at Bethany, at Carver. At Malcolm. A long and glorious tradition in that family, abandoning each other. Abandoning Hawke.

So perhaps it shouldn't have surprised me that the friends Hawke gathered around himself would do the same in the end.

Oh, always for the very best of reasons. I doubt Carver longed to be crushed flat by an ogre, and I know Bethany didn't seek the darkspawn taint. Leandra certainly didn't crave the attentions of a madman. Aveline and Merrill went to save lives, and Hawke had all but shoved Isabela and Varric onto that ship.

Even Anders had his reasons, however horrifying his method. They all chose something else over Hawke, even if that something was simply choosing to be careless, to not value themselves the way they should have.

I knew Hawke would call me biased, were I foolish enough to say any of this to him, but it was hard to watch people abandon him and not hate them just a little.

So I brooded at the window long after the sun had set, long after Hawke's breathing had fallen into the steady rhythm of sleep. At some point, even I could stay awake no longer, and I slept, propped against the wall below the window, where Hawke had waited for me this morning.

#

I woke to Hawke's mouth on my cock, his hair brushing my thighs. Aroused and disoriented, I struggled to understand where we were. This wasn't the dingy, narrow room at the inn, and certainly not either of the hard, narrow beds that room held. Instead, I was sprawled on my back in Hawke's huge, soft bed, in his old room, the one in Kirkwall. The one neither of us had thought we would ever see again.

Then I couldn't remember why I had thought that. Why I had thought we would be anywhere but here.

Hawke looked up the length of my body, his lips still wrapped around my cock. His eyes were warm, crinkled at the corners in that perpetual smile I had missed so much.

I frowned, though my hips moved involuntarily as Hawke stroked his thumb across the hollow at the top of my thigh. The memory of his eyes, haunted and grim, faded as quickly as it had appeared.

My frown lingered, and Hawke moved his mouth. "Not the reaction I was expecting," he said, his voice light and teasing, "but I can stop if you like." He leaned back down, his tongue tracing a wet line around the head of my cock before he raised his head again to add, "Though you'll have a _hard_ time convincing me you'd like me to stop."

I gave my head a shake, trying to free myself of the strange memories. "Just a nightmare," I said, my voice hoarse. I touched his cheek, my fingers exploring the rough stubble along his jaw and the smooth curve under his eyes. "I dreamed--"

"Does it matter now?" he interrupted, leaning into my hand. He smiled. "Let me kiss it away."

He bit my fingertips gently, one after the other, his movements careful and deliberate. The same intense focus he gave to fighting, he also gave to fucking. It absorbed his whole attention, and demanded the same of me, that I shut out everything beyond his hands and his mouth and his skin.

I closed my eyes as his lips wandered from fingertips to palm to wrist. Teeth scraped lightly over the inside of my elbow, followed by the wet heat of his tongue. He followed one of my tattoos with his mouth, curving around and up to my shoulder, back down across my chest to tease one nipple, then up my chest again to bite gently at my collarbone.

The next bite was less gentle, and I gasped, hips thrusting upward involuntarily. I buried my hands in his hair, which hung loose from its normal braid. I loved the softness of it, something I so rarely had a chance to appreciate. Hawke kept it tied back most of the time, even during sex. "It gets in the way," he had told me once, when I asked him to leave it down, and he had somehow managed to make even that suggestive.

Now I combed the strands back from his face, gathering them into my hands as he bit the sharp point of my ear, his breath just a little too quick. That sound made me smile and twist a little under him until he rode one thigh, grinding his own hard cock down into my hip.

Even as my body arched up and my mouth met his for a kiss that stole what little breath I had left, a part of me was still distracted by the half-remembered dream. There was something important, something...

"Anders!" I said, without being quite sure why.

Hawke laughed, warm and low against my mouth. "I never knew you felt that way about him. I'm sure he'd be horrified to hear it."

"You killed him." Memories appeared and disappeared, figures in the mist.

"Anders? Not that I haven't wanted to choke him at times, but I like to think I'd remember if I actually did it."

Hawke's knife, the edge catching the light. Anders, head bowed and shoulders slumped. The smell of smoke and burning flesh thick in the air.

"Fenris?" Hawke's voice was coaxing.

"You killed him," I repeated, growing more certain with every moment. "He blew up the chantry, and you killed him."

"Just a dream, love." He ran a hand down my side, fingers pressing hard enough not to tickle, until he gripped one of my hips. "Though if Anders did do such a thing, what else would I do? If he killed so many people, I'd hardly let him walk free."

His tone, somewhere between disinterest and scorn, was perfect, exactly the way I had always hoped to hear him speak of Anders. In fact, everything but that half-remembered nightmare was perfect. Hawke, naked and smiling on top of me. The room around us, promising the life I had come to love, however strange it might have looked to an outsider. Through the open window, I could hear merchants crying their wares in the square below as neighbors called greetings to each other, the sounds of a city at peace with itself. It was all perfect.

I learned long ago not to trust perfection: it's never anything but a mask for lies and rot.

In memory, the chantry exploded into flame once more. I could hear the screaming, and see Hawke's face as the knife came down.

"No," I whispered. Then, "No!"

I have no control over the lies others tell, but I refuse to lie to myself.

Flat on my back with a grown man on top of me, I was at a disadvantage, but not enough to stop me. I pushed a hand between us and flung him back. He landed on the floor with a grunt of pain, sounding so like Hawke that it hurt me.

I rolled off the bed into a low crouch, my eyes darting left and right in search of anything that could be used as a weapon. A few feet away, the demon climbed to its feet, horns sprouting from Hawke's hair even as I watched.

My hands were around its throat before I was consciously aware of having moved. My tattoos flared with my anger, and I lifted the demon from its feet.

"Where is he?" I demanded.

The only response was a gurgling noise, and the flare of magic around the demon's hands. I shook the creature, hard, interrupting whatever spell it had tried to cast.

"Tell me where he is, and I'll kill you quickly."

The demon gurgled again, and I shoved it up against the wall, shifting one hand to its chest to hold it in place as I loosened my grip on its throat. "Tell me!"

"He's right here," the demon answered, and despite its struggles for air, the voice was still recognizably Hawke's.

The room pulled itself apart and was replaced by the viscount's hall. Nobles crowded the space, talking and laughing with a carefree happiness I had never seen in real life. Hawke stood at the top of the stairs in front of the throne, wearing both the viscount's spiked crown and the Champion's armor. The mud and blood that had stained it the last time I saw it were gone, as were the rips and worn places in the leather.

He looked happy, as happy as the nobles around him, and I realized how rarely he had been truly happy in the last year.

My hands were still around the demon's throat, but I was the one struggling for air.

"You could be beside him now," the demon said, and the words hummed along my skin, setting the lyrium to glowing. "And beside him tonight, and every night."

A promise of perfection. It would last for seconds before the demon devoured me, but those seconds would feel like years. Like a lifetime, lived in a perfect world.

"No," I said. "Let him go. Drop the illusion." Behind Hawke, the viscount's seneschal smiled a smile that was a bit too sharp. His eyes found and held mine from across the crowded hall, and I saw fire flash in their depths. Not poetic fire: real fire, as the pride demon challenged me.

I growled and tightened my grip on the desire demon. "Let. Him. Go."

It laughed. "You think we hold him against his will? After everything he's seen, and fought? He knows exactly where he is, and what's happening around him. He lies to himself, but only a very little. The knowledge is just beneath the surface, and the only reason he doesn't see it is because he refuses to look."

I hesitated, looking around the hall again, and was forced to admire the perfection of the illusion. The two demons together had created exactly the right lure for Hawke, pride and desire together.

"If I walk up to him, he'll look," I said, but I didn't move. We had fought so many demons together that I could hardly count them, but a few stood out. A few had offered rewards to tempt even me, and I had seen the hesitation in Hawke's eyes while, aloud, he declined with a laugh and a joke.

"And yet, you remain here," the demon said.

"I trust him. He'll see the truth, without my help."

The demon laughed, and it was Hawke's laugh. "Lying to yourself? I thought you didn't do that." I turned to glare at it, which only earned me another laugh. "You stand here because you _don't_ trust him. You remember Feynriel's dreams in the Fade, and you wonder if Hawke would have taken Torpor's offer if you hadn't been there. After all, even you succumbed to one of my kin. How could he be any different?"

The demon vanished and my hand closed on empty air. An instant later it was back, standing just out of my reach and smiling at me with Hawke's smile. "How much of the man you see matched the man he truly is? And how much is a mask, to please you? This is the question you ask yourself, and the thing that holds you back."

I could close the distance between us and wrap my hands around its throat. Better, I could wrap my hands around its heart and lungs and pull them free of its body. Let it feel what I felt.

I looked back at Hawke and felt my whole body jerk. It was no longer Bran at Hawke's shoulder: instead, it was me. The pride demon smiled at me again and crossed its arms over its...my chest. The hilt of the blade of mercy was so familiar to me that I reached over my own shoulder without thinking.

The sword wasn't there, but why would it be? This was the Fade, and two powerful demons controlled everything I saw and heard and felt.

Once again the world melted, and when my eyes cleared, I was back in Hawke's bedroom. Only half naked this time, and not in bed. I sat cross-legged in front of the fire, a book in my lap, the flames warm against my face and bare chest. Fingers twisted gently in my hair, and I turned, knowing what I would see, dreading it and longing for it in equal measure.

Hawke sprawled in his chair, one leg over the arm and his head thrown back. His eyes were shut, and his chest rose and fell steadily. He might have been asleep but for his hand on my head, combing lightly through my hair.

"Stay with me?" he murmured.

In the shadows behind his chair, the demons lurked, no longer pretending to be anything but themselves.

I straightened and caught his wrist, pressing a kiss against his palm. "I love you," I said. They were words I had never said aloud in the waking world, though Hawke had to know the truth of them.

His fingers curled as if to hold onto the kiss, and he brushed his knuckles along my cheek. "I love you, too." He sounded tired, and sad, and when his eyes opened, I saw the Hawke I had seen every day for the last weeks.

The room ripped apart this time, and my body tore with it. I gasped in pain...

...and opened my eyes on a drab room, in a drab inn, in a drab and tiny village I had never heard of a month ago. I was still sitting under the window. Rain poured in, drenching me, and for a moment, I thought the dream had just been the product of too much emotion and too little sleep.

"Fenris!" Hawke yelled, and I rolled away just as a demon tried to grab me.

I let the movement carry me to my feet, yanking my sword free of its sheath as soon as I could. Hawke crouched by the bed, a dagger in each hand, eyes jumping between the two demons.

I charged, knocking the desire demon completely off its feet and shoving the pride demon away from Hawke. He moved too fast for me to follow, even if I'd dared look away from either demon. I lunged for the pride demon, desperate to distract it before it realized what was happening.

The demon stepped sideways to avoid my blow, only to trip over its fallen companion. In the instant before it regained its balance, Hawke leaped from the shadows onto its back. Both his knives went in deep, and the thing screamed loud enough to wake the entire village as it fell to its knees.

Both demons vanished. In the silence, our too-quick breathing almost echoed.

Without speaking, Hawke and I turned so we were back-to-back, neither of us lowering our weapons. I felt more alive than I had in weeks, my pulse rushing and my hands loose on the hilt of my sword. The blade glowed, the only source of light in the room.

Someone pounded on the room's door. I turned toward the noise, raising my sword before reason caught up. Attackers so rarely knocked before entering.

From the hallway, someone shouted through the wood, "What's going on in there?"

"I'm fine!" Hawke called back, sheathing his knives.

"I didn't ask, now did I? What in Andraste's name are you doing? You'll pay for any damage you do to my inn!"

I gave the room a last look, but no demons presented themselves. Tucking myself in the corner behind the door, sword sheathed once more, I let Hawke open the door wide enough to satisfy the innkeeper. By the sound of it, the man took only a half step into the room before he grunted in annoyance. "Sounded like someone being murdered up here."

"I had a nightmare," Hawke said shortly, with none of his usual easy charm.

The innkeeper grumbled but withdrew, and Hawke closed the door right on his heels.

We stared at each other as we listened to the innkeeper's steps retreat. He paused to talk to someone, and then the hall was quiet.

"A nightmare?" I asked. "I think they were trying to give you the Maker's paradise. Your version of it, at any rate." I unsheathed my sword again, looking it over for blood or damage. Its light was just enough to see by. "I notice I wasn't in it."

I froze, horrified to hear the words come from my mouth.

"What?" Hawke said, frowning at me in confusion. He had drawn his daggers again, giving them the same inspection I had given my sword.

"Nothing. When are we leaving? We can't stay here another night, not with the innkeeper so suspicious."

Hawke took a quick step forward, backing me up against the wall. "What did you say?"

I was tempted to repeat, "when are we leaving?" but escape wouldn't be so easy. "The vision the demon made for you. I wasn't in it. Not until the end, at any rate."

In the light from the blade of mercy, I watched Hawke's face as it moved from confusion to amusement, and then to something I couldn't read at all. He reversed one of his daggers so he could touch my cheek with the back of his hand. "You weren't in it," he agreed. Before I could react, he added, "That's how I knew it was false. Why would I be where you weren't?"

"You tried to send me away just yesterday."

"I'm glad you didn't let me."

Whatever I might have said was lost in the scream that came from the other side of the door. Other shouts joined in, and through the noise I made out one word: "Demon!"

Hawke snatched the door open, but I slammed it closed again with one hand.

"If we go out there, word will spread that Kirkwall's Champion was here."

"If we don't go out there, all those people will die." He hesitated, then grinned. "It's the principle of the thing, isn't it?"

He pulled the door back open before I could respond, leaving me no choice but to follow him out and down the stairs.

The inn's common room hadn't had much to recommend it before, from the glimpses I'd caught as the others came and went, but now it reminded me too much of the chantry after Anders was done with it. Blood and bodies and flames were everywhere, and the demons stood at the center of it.

The rational part of my mind knew there couldn't have been more than a score of people in the common room, but I couldn't shake the word "carnage" from my head. It didn't help that many of the bodies lay in pieces, blood spatters decorating the walls and ceilings. Lanterns lay smashed everywhere, creating pottery and glass caltrops to stab into my bare feet.

On the other hand, the lack of light gave Hawke plenty of shadows to hide in.

I took a deep breath and let the lyrium on my skin come to life, making me half a ghost. Overturned benches and tables blocked any direct path to the demons. I couldn't simply charge forward and hope to knock them back with the weight of my body, not if I didn't want to end up flat on my face.

From the other side of the room (and how had he gotten over there so fast?), Hawke lobbed one of his flasks into the center of the room. The only benefit to the demons' destruction was that there were no bystanders to worry about anymore, and we would take advantage of that.

I knew by the smell that the flask had been one of the last of Hawke's Fell Grenades. He'd spent most of them in the fight with the templars, and once they were gone, there would be no way to get more. Tomwise was as likely to turn us in as help us, and no one else knew the making of the things.

It was worth it, though, to see both demons fall back screaming. In that moment of confusion, I jumped from broken table to broken table until I landed between them, and the blade of mercy swung wide enough to wound both.

The pride demon recovered quickly, but the desire demon collapsed to hands and knees, coughing blood. I raised my sword to finish it off, only to leap sideways at Hawke's shouted warning. The pride demon's blow missed me by inches, and it hissed in frustration.

I brought the sword up into a guard position, turning so I could see both demons. The desire demon didn't look like much of a threat anymore, but it didn't take much strength to stab someone in the back.

Hawke had vanished again, and I saw the pride demon look around for him. Before it could find him, I shouted and charged, determined to keep its attention fixed firmly on me. It blocked the blow and retaliated with one of its own.

I wasn't quick enough this time, and I hit the floor hard, the breath knocked from my lungs. Pain stabbed through my side, and I had broken enough ribs in my life to recognize another one. Fighting with a broken rib was dangerous, but so was lying on the ground at a demon's feet.

Another flask came flying out of the shadows, catching the pride demon in the side of the head and stunning it just long enough for me to stagger up. Unfortunately, it recovered before I could run it through, blocking my thrust and laughing.

That laugh turned to a scream as Hawke sprang from the shadows and stabbed it in the back once more. He twisted as he pulled both knives free and darted away again, skipping nimbly out of reach as the demon tried to hit him.

I brought my sword back around and delivered the killing blow to the desire demon just staggering to its feet. The feeling of satisfaction as its head parted company with its body gave me the strength to follow through on that blow, momentum carrying the sword around and straight through the pride demon.

It went to its knees, and Hawke was there again, knives moving across each other like the blades of a giant pair of scissors, with the demon's neck between them. The blades weren't long enough to sever the head completely, but the blade of mercy finished the job in one quick blow.

Panting, I looked at Hawke across the bodies. He grinned at me, blood and soot smeared across his face. I couldn't help but smile back.

Then I took a step, and the pain in my ribs reminded me that we hadn't come through unscathed. I managed not to make a sound, but it wiped away the smile.

"We need to go," I said, hoping he would mistake the cause of my breathlessness.

Hawke knew me too well. He stepped around the bodies and transferred both knives to one hand so he could grab my arm. "Where are you hurt?"

"My ribs. Nothing that won't heal. Assuming we don't linger for the locals to gather their courage to come see the damage."

He hesitated, then nodded and headed for the stairs, wiping his daggers clean as he went. I followed more slowly, every step painful. By the time I made it to the room, Hawke had already dug out one of our meager supply of potions.

I pushed it away. "No. We can't waste it, not for something as small as this."

Hawke pushed it back at me. "And how fast can you run, if you don't take it?"

We stared each other down over the potion, me scowling and Hawke smiling, until at last he sobered. "I can't stand to see you hurting," he said softly.

There was nothing I could say to that. It was hard for me to deny him anything, and only once had I resisted the look he was giving me now. The result had been three wasted years.

I took the potion and drank half of it, carefully wedging the cork back in when I was done. Warmth spread through me, mouth to throat to belly and then outward, dulling the pain until the injury might have been days old. Without comment, Hawke found a place in his pack for the half empty bottle.

We left via the window, the alley empty of any observers. At the near end, we could see a crowd gathering and hear panicked shouts. We turned the other way, and ran.

It was still raining, and my ribs still ached, even if the pain was muted. I blessed and cursed the rain in equal measure: it slowed our progress, but it would also help disguise our trail.

By the time we stopped at midday, the curses far outnumbered the blessings. We were both soaked through and muddy from head to foot. I'm not even sure how Hawke saw the cave, except that he's always had a knack for finding hidden things. That knack had put our lives in danger as many times as it had saved them, but now it was certainly welcome.

However he found it, the cave was dry. A little ways in, it grew wide enough and tall enough that we could light a fire without choking on the smoke, assuming there was any dry wood to be found. I shed my pack and went back out into the rain, leaving Hawke to make camp by the light of a single torch.

It took a while, and my teeth were chattering by the time I was done, but I managed to find enough wood to hold us a few days. Only some of it was actually dry, but the rest of it was from old deadfalls and would dry out quickly enough by the fire, assuming we could get one started in the first place.

That small worry, at least, proved groundless, as Hawke already had a fire burning merrily by the time I brought in the last load of wood. He took it from my arms and set it aside, then began to work at unbuckling my armor. Under normal circumstances, I would have pushed him away and done it myself, but the cold and exhaustion were too much. For once, I was content to let someone help me without looking for another motive.

I should have known better.

He'd removed my gauntlets and was fighting with a buckle on my back when he spoke, for almost the first time since we'd left the inn.

"About Anders," he began, then stopped as I stiffened. He paused to run a hand down my bare arm, much as he might have soothed a skittish horse. "I shouldn't have said that, and Varric was right to call me on it." He ran one finger lightly over one of the lines in my skin.

That touch was almost painful, my skin aching unpleasantly at the contact, shying away as if I was still in Danarius's household, where even the gentlest brush of skin was only the prelude to some new and inventive torture. It had been a long time since I had flinched from anyone's touch, much less Hawke's.

Scrambling to regain my equilibrium, I didn't realize Hawke was still speaking until a name caught my attention.

"...Thrask and Grace." No hint what the rest of the sentence might have been, only that it had been grim. Hawke's hand on my arm tightened, and the one on my back pressed hard enough that I could feel it even through my armor. "We never talked about it, you and I, not with everything else unraveling so fast, but..." He pressed his forehead down against my shoulder, unmindful of the spike that passed so close to his face. I could only see him from the corner of my eye, his body keeping me from turning. His breathing was too loud in my ear.

"When I saw you lying at their feet," Hawke went on at last, voice low and harsh, "all I could think about was finding every hurt they had done you so that I could do the same to them, ten times over. Not for the sake of justice. I didn't want _justice_." He snorted derisively. "I wanted _vengeance_. I wanted them to bleed, and cry, and die by inches, in pain, begging for mercy."

I thought of Hadriana, and of Danarius, and the dreams of a broken slave almost too broken to dream. It had been dangerous even to think of taking a knife to a magister, to imagine drawing on his skin, in blood, the same marks he had drawn on mine in lyrium. Their deaths had been quick, but only out of the fear that I might not be able to stop, if I let myself start.

I laid one hand carefully over Hawke's, not sure what to say but no longer desperate to avoid his touch.

He drew a deep breath and tilted his head enough to rest the side of it against my jaw. "Facing Thrask and Grace...I remember how much power there was in that rage, that desire for vengeance. With Anders..." He trailed off again, but his hand moved under mine so he could twine our fingers awkwardly together. "After the chantry went up, I was just tired. How could I blame him for wanting vengeance, the same as I had, when he had so many more reasons to want it? And yet, I kept thinking of all the people I killed for far lesser crimes. If those deaths were just, then how could his death be anything else? As much sympathy as I had for his cause, he killed so many people who wanted for themselves the same things he wanted for mages: to live their lives as well as they could, free of fear. To not have their choices made for them." He snorted, almost a laugh. "Now, if it had been the templars' barracks he blew up...."

A deep sigh moved through him, and he straightened, sliding his hand out from under mine to set to work again on removing my armor. "Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't doomed from the start, the moment he made his bargain with Justice. The real world doesn't allow for the same purity of purpose as the Fade, does it?"

I was glad he was behind me, where neither of us could see the other's face. "Do...did you love him?" I asked, and was proud of how level my tone was.

Hawke went still again, and there was a long pause, one I couldn't read. After it had stretched too long, I felt the sharp tug as he resumed his struggle with wet leather. "I do. How can you fight beside someone for six years, argue with them, drink with them, guard them and be guarded by them, and not love them?"

I drew breath and got a sharp flick to the back of one ear. "I didn't say anything about _like_. I loved my brother, too, and he was a horse's ass." Despite the lightness of the words, there was the old pain in his voice. "That's what family is, isn't it? Whatever we think of each other's choices, we face the outside world together."

I barely remembered my mother, and my memories of Varania weren't anything I would use as a model for another relationship. Hawke's friends, though...

And were they really only Hawke's friends, by the end? I thought of Aveline, changing the guard patrols around my mansion. Of Varric, finding me jobs that made me allies in Kirkwall's underworld, even if I sometimes rebuffed him. Of Isabela, stopping in just to spend a lazy afternoon in front of my fire, flirting and playing cards.

I thought of Merrill, so perennially cheerful and so determined to save everything of the past that she could lay her hands on. I had only glimpses of my life before Danarius's ritual, and I knew the longing to reclaim what was lost. I thought of Anders, his deft hands seeking injuries despite my protests. How many times in the last half dozen years had I opened my eyes to him frowning over me, concerned and disapproving?

Maybe they weren't all my friends, but they had certainly been my family.

For the first time, I grieved for Anders's death, not just the deaths of his victims. I grieved for the waste of it, for all the things he could have been and done without Justice. I remembered the conversation with Isabela that Hawke had alluded to, about freedom and mages. "It's about having choices made for you," she'd said. What choices had Justice made for Anders?

Hawke cursed in triumph as the strap came free at last, allowing him to lift away the top half of my armor. That left me even colder, something I hadn't thought possible, shivering as drafts brushed across my damp skin and the thin shirt I wore under my armor.

"Almost there," Hawke murmured, kneeling to work on my greaves.

He had the left one off before I managed to ask the one question I had never dared. "Were you lovers?"

Hawke paused and looked up at me, his hands on my calf warm through the damp linen. "It would serve you right if I said yes." He was smiling, though.

"Serve me right?"

"You avoided me for _three years_ , Fenris. Just because I understand now doesn't change those years when I had no idea." He raised an eyebrow in challenge. "You wouldn't even answer the door when I knocked. I thought you were done with me."

"I wasn't. I wanted to be with you, you know that."

"I know," he said, and pulled the last piece of armor free. He set it with the rest and stood, taking my face in both hands. "I know," he repeated, leaning down to press his forehead to mine.

"I came when I heard about your mother." It was such a small thing, against what someone else could have given him, someone who hadn't been broken as many times as I had.

"I remember." I heard the smile in his voice. "Which is why the answer to your question is _no_."

It took me a moment to walk back over the twisty conversational path we had wandered, but my breath stuck when I finally recalled my question. "I wouldn't blame you if you had gone to him," I said. Whispered, really. If I'd spoken any louder, he would have been able to hear my voice shake.

Hawke's hands tightened, his fingers pressing into my cheeks hard enough to hurt. His eyes were closed, his mouth pinched. "I don't remember much about the days right after my mother's death, and most of what I can recall I would rather forget." One thumb traced the veins of lyrium on my chin. "You were the one right thing in all that."

"I didn't do anything. I hardly even said anything." I hadn't known what to say, as seemed to happen so often in my life.

"You were _there_. What could you have said, anyway?" His grip on my face loosened again, but he didn't let go, and he didn't move away. "I had an endless supply of people talking at me, blaming me and pitying me and mouthing platitudes. As if 'well, it's all part of the Maker's plan' means a damn thing. As if 'now she's with Malcolm and Carver and Bethany' isn't just a reminder that all of them are dead. That I couldn't protect any of them." He swallowed hard, and my own throat hurt in sympathy. "I didn't need more words. I had too fucking many already."

"I don't know if I can take credit for the silence. I didn't know _what_ to say."

Hawke snorted, his breath warm against my mouth. "They didn't know what to say, either. So they said stupid things, or hurtful things, or they avoided me completely." He kissed me, hard and quick. "Even when you disappeared again, when you wouldn't answer the door or come to the Hanged Man, I had that to hold onto. Why would I have wanted anyone else?"

The second kiss was just as hard but not in the least bit quick. His tongue flicked across my lips as he slid his hands across my cheeks to grab two handfuls of my hair. After a startled moment, I pressed forward to meet him, mouth open. His shirt was as wet as mine when I grabbed it, but his skin was warm underneath.

He pulled away long enough to strip his shirt off, struggling a little with the wet fabric and laughing at himself, the way he used to laugh at everything. I tried to help and only ended up tangling us both, until his head came free while our arms were still wound together in the cloth. Still laughing, he used that tangle of limbs and clothing to pull me close enough to take up the kiss where he had left off.

Too many memories collided together, and I had to fight off panic at being bound. Before I could do more than tense, the shirt was gone and my hands free again. I clenched them into fists, briefly, just to remind myself that I could, then let Hawke uncurl my fingers by pressing his in between them.

He broke the kiss and leaned back enough to focus, his dark eyes measuring, a look I had seen more than once in the years I had known him, even before we slept together. That look searched for the cracks and pressure points inside me, trying to decide if some word or action might cause me to snap. Not that Hawke was the only person to ever look at me and wonder that, but I had learned to tolerate it from him because his eyes never held any of the emotions that crowded in others': pity, or fear, or the desire to find those weak places expressly so he could push on them.

Still, it wasn't the look I wanted on his face right then, and it certainly wasn't what I wanted him thinking about.

I twisted free of his hands to pull off my own shirt, to roll my wet trousers down my legs. Leaving it all in a damp pile on the ground, I sprawled out on the bedrolls Hawke had laid beside the fire and looked up at him.

He smiled, and my breath stopped again, for entirely different reasons than before. His hair was wet and plastered flat to his head, a few limp strands escaping from his braid to stick to his neck and cheeks. His hands were dirty, the nails cracked. Firelight picked out a dozen scars, from a childhood spent on the run and an adulthood spent fighting, starting at Ostagar.

I had never wanted anyone as badly.

My eyes still on his, I reached down and stroked my half-hard cock.

His smile widened into a grin: _the_ grin, cheerful and charming and just a little bit wicked. He sat at the end of the bedroll long enough to slither out of his pants, then turned, pressing his mouth to the sharp bone at the inside of my ankle. Slowly, he made his way up the length of my body, lips charting their own course, heedless of the lyrium and whether he followed those lines or not.

Along my shin, his tongue traced one line for a few inches before leaving it for unmarked skin, then picking up a different line just above my knee. He let that one lead him all the way up my thigh, but at the crease where my leg and hip connected, he went his own way again, pausing to rub his cheek against my hipbone.

I could feel his breath on my hand and the head of my cock, but he didn't linger. Instead, he continued up my body, leaning to one side so I could keep on stroking myself, his stubble rough against my ribs and the inside of my arm. His hand gripped my thigh, thumb stroking just short of where my own hand worked slowly up and down.

He buried his face in the hollow of my shoulder, drawing a breath so deep his chest pressed hard against mine. My free hand ran down his spine to his ass, pulling him in closer, reveling in the feel of his erection pressing into my leg. I let go of my own cock to reach for his, but he caught my hand before I could make the angle work.

It was a light hold, one it would have been easy to break, his fingers looping gently around my palm. Instead of pulling away, I let him guide my hand back to where it had been, his fingers covering mine as he closed them around the base of my cock. Even after I resumed stroking, his hand remained, following my movements on the shaft for a while before drifting up to toy with the head, teasing the slit.

My hips rolled as his fingers found the perfect pressure and rhythm, and I felt him smile against my neck. He bit my collarbone, just the right side of painful, then shifted so he could kiss me again, mouth open, tongue darting out to taste my lips.

I arched up against him and moaned, the sound swallowed by the kiss except for the answering vibration I felt in his chest. A wet strand of his hair slid across my cheek, only to make its way as far as our mouths. Hawke laughed and pulled back, shaking his head in an attempt to get his hair under control without moving his hands.

I took advantage of his distraction.

Hawke might have been taller, but I was stronger. Before he had a chance to protest, I rolled us over, keeping just enough sense to roll _away_ from the fire.

Which dropped Hawke's bare back against cold stone. He hissed and jerked, already laughing before I could even begin an apology. His hand in my hair pulled my head back down, and I didn't fight it, smiling against his laughing mouth.

I let myself be distracted for a pleasant moment by that kiss, by the feel of his tongue thrusting against mine and his teeth nipping at my lower lip. Straddling his hips, cock pressed to cock, I was tempted to stay here, to ride him like this until we were both sated.

But I had other things in mind, even if the thought was as terrifying as it was exhilarating.

I mirrored the path he had taken up my body, moving down instead of up. Partly it was to tease him, to feel him suck in a breath as he realized where I was going, but it was also to give myself time. Time to remind myself that this was my choice: no rough hands pushed at my head, and there would be no punishment if I changed my mind.

Hawke's hands brushed my face and hair, but he knew better than to grip either. From the corner of my eye, I watched him grab fistfuls of the bedroll on one side. On the other side, his fingers splayed wide against the cold stone, pressing hard enough to turn the nails white.

He gasped when I wrapped my lips around his cock, his hips moving in an aborted thrust. I braced my forearms across his thighs, pinning him in place with my weight. The only thing I wanted him to think about was his own pleasure, but I didn't know what memories might surface if he let himself go. If he thrust back far enough to cut off my air...

I brushed aside the looming memories, and the panic they brought with them. _This is Hawke,_ I reminded myself. It wasn't so hard to remember, really. The differences were too numerous to count, but counting them reminded me where and when I was.

_This is Hawke. Hawke._

"Fenris," he whispered, and his voice cracked. "You don't...."

I let his cock slide from my mouth and rubbed it along my cheek. "You talk too much."

He laughed. "So you tell--ah!" The laugh ended on a gasp as I ran my tongue down the shaft, and his hips jerked under my arms. With the full weight of my body bracing them, I felt it as a ripple along his thighs more than anything. One of his hands found mine where it rested against his stomach, and his fingers traced the bones and lyrium lines as my mouth moved on him.

I lost track of time, focused on the feel and sound and taste of him. He'd never been loud during sex, perhaps a side effect of having his mother's bedroom so close to his, but I was learning how to read his breathing and the few quiet moans that escaped him. With Hawke, I could enjoy the power I had over him here, the power to render him speechless and shaking with just my mouth.

With Danarius, I had never been the one with power, no matter what I was doing with my mouth.

Eventually I even forgot to think of my old master, those memories lost under the sound of Hawke whispering my name, the feel of his body arching under mine, the taste of his seed on my tongue.

When his body went limp again, I laid my cheek on his hip, breathing in his scent. My own hard cock demanded attention, but the simple pleasure of resting against him was its own prize, something I might seek as urgently as physical relief. It had taken me a long time to learn how to enjoy the feel of someone else's skin against mine.

Hawke's fingers combing through my hair brought me out of the half-doze I had sunk into without realizing. At his urging, I crawled back up onto the bedrolls, now tangled under our bodies. His hands drifted as I moved, coming to rest one on the small of my back, the other wrapped around my cock.

I tangled my legs with his and leaned down for another kiss, licking along the edge of his lips until his mouth opened. The angle was awkward, his hand half-trapped between our bodies, but kissing Hawke was one of the few pleasures that wasn't contaminated by any memories of Danarius.

Hawke took advantage of my inattention to turn the tables on me, just as I had done to him earlier. I didn't end up on the rocky ground, at least, but a twist in the bedroll formed a hard knot pressing into my hip.

Then his mouth was around me, hot and wet, his hands and his tongue dragging me out of my thoughts. There was nothing but the moment, my pulse beating in my throat and Hawke's hair under my hands, damp and tangled and warm, until the world broke apart into brilliant pieces, and I couldn't think at all.

When I could think again, Hawke was lying beside me, his head resting on my shoulder and one leg thrown over both of mine. The bedroll was still knotted under me, but I couldn't bring myself to care enough to shift away from Hawke for the moment it would take to straighten it out. His breath was warm on my skin, the shallow rise and fall of his chest soothing.

"What did they show you?" Hawke asked. "Sorry," he added when I jerked in surprise at the sound of his voice.

"I thought you were asleep," I said, half asleep myself. Then his question penetrated the fog in my head, and I was wide awake again. "What did who show me?" I asked, stalling for time.

Hawke snorted, a sharp puff of air that I felt more than heard. "You had the chance to see what the demons tempted me with. What bait did they put in the trap laid for you?"

I brought one hand up to explore his face, wanting to know his expression but afraid to let him see mine. In the desire demon's dream, everything had been perfect, even sex: no awkwardness, no stumbling, no miscalculations that landed anyone's bare skin on cold stone. No memories of old pain to ruin anything.

"Fenris?" he asked, and there was the barest trace of hesitation in his voice.

I knew that hesitation, and the thoughts that lay behind it. In the dream, I had said the words I knew he wanted to hear, but those words had no place in the real world, where men like Danarius and women like Hadriana used love as another weapon to hold onto their power. Outside of dreams, I always choked on "I love you."

But maybe there were other ways to say it.

"You," I said at last. "They tempted me with you."

END


End file.
